Airstream Life with No Experience

We are headed back to get our tour of our new Airstream and go through all of the technical things that we don't know, which is a lot. But before we get too far into this, probably a pretty good idea to let you know how we ended up here. I'm Lauren. And I'm Daniel. For a decade, we pursued the American dream of owning our own business. After a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, our little company turned into a successful enterprise. If you were looking at us from the outside, you saw the big house, the nice cars. We had all of the cool stuff. Then in 2019, we watched a documentary on minimalism, and it changed our lives. We decided to sell everything except for the company, of course, and travel the globe. Then 2020 happened. The pandemic has exploded to well over a quarter of a million cases worldwide. Every major city in the world has American tourists trying to figure out how to get home before it becomes impossible to do so. We were in Africa when COVID-19 exploded across the globe, and we ended up having to take a U.S. rescue flight home. Needless to say, we're pretty happy to stay on American soil for a little while. But sitting still really is not our thing. We've always loved exploring locally. More than ever, our country and our small businesses need us to shop locally, and we wanted to do our part to make a difference. So we've launched a 365-day, 50-state tour to shop 100% American-made and as local as possible, and we're doing it all in an Airstream. We're all new to this RV lifestyle, but after researching ways to travel the country safely, we decided this would be the best fit for us. So we decided to go all in on that RV life. But it's really our hope as we share our adventures with you that you'll be inspired to get out there and create memories of your own in our beautiful country. We want to inspire you to wander local too. ...degle, and this is your handle lock. And they also read to the touch panel inside. First time you hit it, it's going to do your door. This whole cover is going to slide off. This one has the awning on it, but all the rest... So you got your stove top open. Kind of pick up the weight of the carriage. This you don't have to do much with. That little arm on, you swing from left to right. The left one is for cable. A lot of people put sewer hoses in there. That's hooking up to the cam cycle. Okay, so we just had our first walkthrough, where we went through the exterior of the new Airstream, and then also the interior, as well as the tech components. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a bit much, but we kind of expected there to be this steep learning curve. And I anticipate over the next few weeks, we'll become more comfortable with it. But there is certainly a lot to learn, and we're ready for the challenge and super excited just to get started. What Daniel actually means by getting started is figuring out how to drive it, and how to actually back it into places. Apparently, this is going to be something we have to do on the regular. It's not exactly simple. We're in trouble. Backed into the spot. Now we just need to get it unhitched from the truck. And I'm sure we missed one of the 500 steps in the dealership, but this is an electric jack right here. And just need to figure out how to get power to it. So in all honesty, I have absolutely no idea what's happening right now, but we've moved the Airstream to where we're going to park it and pack it. But now that we've done that, we can't get it off the hitch. That's all I got. It gets very technical from there. Something about power and connectivity, and I have no idea. But Daniel is on the phone with the Airstream team, and they're awesome. So they're going to help us figure it out. Did we say we have no idea what we were doing? Truck. Okay. All right. Mother. Uh, yes. We haven't used it yet. It's just there. I literally just bought the kit from you guys. It says DE on it. Oh, the tail light cracked. When did we do that? How did we do that? When you were turning it, like in the diagonal angle, you must've hit it. Well, first dinger on the truck. Just literally, as soon as I try to put it in there, it pops. Is there? Yeah. Like, as soon as I try to put it in there, it starts. Success. Apparently, when we jackknifed the truck, we didn't hit the Airstream. We hit the propane tanks, which pinched a wire and screwed it up. But no big, nothing a little electrical tape can't fix. And I am sure it won't be the last thing we screw up. Now onto packing. Packing for the kitchen is one of the most important things to me because I kind of consider myself an amateur vegan chef. So it was really important that I'm able to do all the things that I do in our normal kitchen in the RV. So, like any good vegan chef, I am bringing my food processor. I got myself little plastic bowls for prep, which I'm pretty excited about. All of the gadgets. All of my cooking books because I simply can't live without them. I actually took the time and took all of my spices and made them very portable. What's kind of funny about these is that Daniel actually ordered these little spice holders a year and a half ago when we sold all of our stuff because he thought that he was going to cook on the road. We never ended up using them, but now they're coming in handy. And then here is what the first round of our pantry is going to entail. And as you can see, Daniel has not given up on his very fancy old fashions. He's bringing his whole kit. We'll see how long this lasts. But let's see if it'll all fit. All right, Daniel. So we are about 50% of the way packed with the trailer. How are you feeling right now? I feel like if I were giving a tip to somebody just getting started out, I would say to map out easily three to five days, not like same day turnaround. I think the same day turnaround thing is a bit much. We're scrambling to get to the park the very first night when in reality, we probably should have spent a little bit more time preparing for that. After a super eventful day, we've decided that even though we have a campsite booked in St. Pete tonight, that we're just going to stay at my dad's place, relax, take a real shower because we think we've sweat like 16 gallons and finish packing the Airstream a little more slowly. But I'm so excited to show you this because I cannot even really quite believe this is real. Come check out how well all my kitchen stuff stored. This is insane. I think the first thing that's important to notice is that you don't see hardly anything out here. And y'all saw how much kitchen stuff that I had. So this is what we've got going on. All of this stuff was able to store up here. Now we know and understand that there's going to be a lot of movement. So what we have heard to do is that we just need to tuck some towels up in here and hopefully that will help. Maybe some things won't break or maybe they will. We'll figure it out later. That's the first little bit of it. And then also we have storage underneath here. So you can see I have our silverware set up. And then down here pots and pans, Ziploc bags. Under here I have rice and oats and pasta. Up here I have all my cooking books, vegan protein, a couple more spices. And you'll notice this is not all kitchen stuff. I have our knives, our Instapots and video games. Or not video games, regular real board games. My refrigerator, nicely stocked. We really need to make another grocery run, but it's a good starting point. One of the things that I did not tell you about that I did is in advance of leaving, I made all the amazing vegan frozen foods. So these are vegan burgers. I have falafel and burritos and all sorts of amazing stuff. And then last but not least, we've got this little pantry here, which is full of all sorts of goodness. And then very last, but as you can see, holy crap, all of that stuff actually fit. I can't even hardly believe it. It's incredible. I've heard so many people talk about how RV life, not a lot of space, especially with Airstreams because of the way they were rounded. But I'm pretty darn impressed with that. Day one, complete. And we're really tired. So tired. It was so much more than we had planned for. It just seemed like around every bend, there was something new popping up that we needed to learn or deal with. But that's part of the journey, really. This is day one and we knew we had a lot to learn. So unexpectedly, we actually get to stay one more night in a real bed. So tomorrow is a new day. I think the biggest lesson here is to... Actually, your uncle texted me today and said, just don't rush it. I think it's probably the best advice I could give to anybody. Don't try to pack it all in one day. You're just crazy if you do. Take your time. Pack, make it a comfortable experience before you head out on the road. We're notoriously not planners and notoriously the kind of people who try to pack too much in, in general. So, I mean, this was bound to happen to us. But all in all, there was only a couple of really insane mishaps, a couple of drops of blood. No one got electrocuted. We all survived. Pass or win? We're really excited about starting over with day two. Day two means Disney and we're super excited to check that out. I've read a lot about it. I have no idea what time we're gonna get there. It really depends on how quickly we pack and head out. So we'll see what happens. Good news is we're early morning people. So we'll get an early start. It's gonna be great. After a good night's sleep, we got up and we packed the Airstream. And we did it. Bathroom's empty. Closet's empty. Bedroom's empty. We're officially ready to get on the road. Well, after 24 hours of packing and probably like 600 gallons of sweat in the 100 degree Florida weather, we are officially packed. I think we have everything, but you just never really know. So the good news is if we're out of something while we're on the road, we'll just stop at a local shop and pick it up. It's 100% guaranteed that we forgot something. But it's gonna be fine. That's part of the journey. It's gonna be fun. But moving is stressful. So we're super ready to be on the road. Wish us luck. We're right around the corner from the apartment and somebody's flagging us down in a truck next to us. And then we stopped and we got out of the truck. And they go, the door to your camper's open while you're driving down the road. Somehow somebody forgot to either lock it or didn't do the deadbolt. I did the deadbolt and the whole thing. This door hates me. We literally got three minutes down the road before we're like messing things up already. But I got this, I think. Show us how you're gonna lock this. I'm gonna get this on video now. Well, step one would be having the right keys. Airstream keys. Okay, so this is the deadbolt lock. I literally played with it for like 10 minutes before, but I got it right last time. So everybody sees that now, right? Okay, how about the top one? Is it a top lock? Yeah, so this is the top lock. Top lock, I think it's already done. I don't think I'm doing this right. Maybe you have to lock the top lock first. Because I definitely did it the opposite way last time. I have no idea at this point. I mean, it feels locked. No. Okay, Daniel's turn. I'll take the camera. First off, just to prepare you, Airstreams come with a lot of keys because there are a lot of locks. But that's okay, that's a good thing because you want to secure everything. All right, so there we go. Okay, so that does the top lock. That's the bottom lock. Okay, so bottom lock. All right, winning. Daniel to the rescue. All right, let's get on the road. After our final mishap of not locking the door, we were finally on the road. Has to get easier, right?